American Masters

What was inspiring about Raul is it was a personal journey. How can he bring everything of himself to his art? The documentary film, "Raul

Julia

The World's a Stage", is primarily about revealing the amazing and incredible story of a Puerto Rican actor who came to New York City and took the theater world by storm. He knocked my socks off. He was just a terrific actor. What I just take away from him is his authentic passion for the craft. He had a confidence about who he was. Raul was a game changer for Latino actors in the United States and he did it through the magnificence of his talent and the incredible charisma that he had both on stage and off. The world is getting smaller and smaller. It's no longer you or I. It's you and I. Many of the challenges we face had to do with trying to uncover all this incredible archive footage. One of the most exciting finds that we discovered was the performance of Taming of the Shrew that Raul starred in with Meryl Streep. Once we found that footage that was incredible. Here she comes and now Petruchio, speak. I feel like Raul was one of the ground breaking pioneers in true diversity. Once you started looking at him you stopped looking at his ethnicity, you stopped looking at anything else but his passion. A lot of actors of Hispanic heritage ended up changing their name out of absolute necessity to get work so they wouldn't get typecast but Raul set an example of not having to do that. In a lot of ways Raul Julia's story is as relevant today as it was back then. The battles that he was undertaking are still present. I hope what this film will do is demonstrate, particularly the young people, that they don't have to become somebody else to become successful. They can insist on being themselves and make the greatest possible gift to the country. (upbeat music)